Winning marketing

As the marketing and digital landscape continually keep evolving, it is necessary for every business to keep up with the changes. If you don’t, you are sure to be left behind in the rat race. It doesn’t matter whether you are a B2C business or a B2B one, you need to step up your game. Unfortunately, though, B2B marketing is not as simple as B2C marketing. Not only are their sales cycles longer and more complicated but winning over the trust of decision makers is quite difficult. And in most cases, there are multiple players involved in the entire process. That being said, you can certainly win over your target audiences with one basic trick - be personal and be human. And there are a variety of strategies that can help you do just that. Here are seven ways of upgrading your B2B marketing strategy that helps you win over your potential customers with ease. 1. Live Videos A study by Livestream found that 80% of people prefer watching live videos more than reading blog … [Read more...] about 7 Ways to Upgrade Your B2B Marketing Strategy

With the advent of digital marketing, especially search engine optimization, brands have felt increasing pressure to blur the lines between ethical and unethical marketing strategies. At the same time, social media has given consumers a much bigger stage upon which to stand and voice their displeasure at brands they find wanting. The answer to the question, “What’s driving your business?” is relatively straightforward. What drives every business is the need to make a profit. What’s not so straightforward is an answer to the question, “What is the ethical framework of your profit-driven marketing strategy?” This tension between morality and making a profit is as old as the proverbial snake oil salesman. In traditional forms of advertising, we can usually make the distinction between ethical and unethical marketing. If the promotion lies, conceals vital information or deceives the unsophisticated buyer, the advertiser can be called to account. On this … [Read more...] about Ethics in Online Marketing: Does Brand Morality Matter?

International Women’s Day is March 8th, so it seemed like the perfect time to recognize some of the fantastic females around the world who are making things happen in the marketing space. Looking for women I’d want to include led me to tons of blogs, social channels, and brands. The good news is, there are tons of people to include, but the challenge is—there are tons to wade through! There are a number of other lists out there, so to make this list a bit different, I did a couple of things: First, I tried to remove anyone that I had already seen on multiple “who to follow” lists. Not because they’re not awesome, but because chances are, you’re already following them, so this is an opportunity to find some new faces. Second, while I am including most Twitter handles in the list, not all of the women on this list are necessarily avid Twitter users. I extend my definition of “follow” to mean that you should check out their blogs, … [Read more...] about 50 Women Marketers to Follow

Spread out across all of the articles and discussions online, I’ve read more than a bit of speculation. So, I decided to get together with the product management team behind expanded text ads to definitively answer some of the most common questions. 1. Does anything bad happen if I wait until the last possible moment to upgrade? You’re not directly penalized or anything like that. However, I wouldn’t recommend sitting on your hands. Think about how long you’ve been honing your standard text ads — probably years, right? Early adopters of ETAs have generally said that iterating on successful ads is crucial. The earlier you adopt, the earlier you start learning things. 2. How do ETAs interact in the auction, especially with standard text ads still running? Nothing about the AdWords auction has fundamentally changed. Each ad receives specific, auction-time quality ratings, and that quality rating is combined with your bid and the expected impact of your ad … [Read more...] about Thirteen things marketers want to know about expanded text ads, direct from Google

SEO and digital marketing are incredibly complicated, and the digital landscape is in constant evolution and flux. New platforms. New competitors. The new world of marketing has evolved, yet processes for managing and adapting to change have not always kept pace. There is much to learn here from the worlds of manufacturing and software development. New project management strategies have evolved that have revolutionized these industries. We hear very little about these approaches in the world of marketing, even though they are well suited to the ever-changing landscape of SEO and digital marketing. At the core of these approaches is a burning desire to inspect and adapt, to eliminate waste and to strive for constant improvement. This is coupled with an agile approach, which leads to improvements in speed, reductions in costs and improved results. In this article, I discuss Scrum, the project management strategy we use at my company to manage client projects and improve our internal … [Read more...] about Using agile project management for SEO & digital marketing